OPINION: Our country needs a good overhaul

COMMENT BY BILL HOFFMAN: BEFORE there is any "mature debate", as the Prime Minister puts it, on the future of GST, there needs to be a mature debate on what's happening to this country we can at least agree we all love.

Mr Abbott wants to discuss federal-state relations, revenue raising and spending responsibilities, in a move widely seen as the start of a push to either raise the GST to 12.5% or broaden its base to draw in the $13 billion a year in exemptions for most food, education financial services and health expenditure.

His call for a rethink of federalism to better empower states to bridge the gap between what they can afford and the services they offer comes just months after the Budget moved to strip $80 billion from state hospitals and schools by 2024-25.

Setting aside the fundamental hypocrisy of Mr Abbott calling for a mature debate on anything after the appalling way he has treated a legitimate and necessary constraint on big polluters, first principles should demand a rigorous assessment of how this nation functions.

On all available evidence the gene pool is clearly too shallow to maintain six state and two territory governments as well as a federal parliament. All the debate, all the political wrangling and backroom deals are taking us nowhere fast.

What should be a great nation is being paralysed by politics. We are 23 million people with nine governments separately legislating every aspect of our lives.

The fragmentation has left us bereft of any shared national vision and without a leader at any level of government capable of articulating one. Instead we get slogans, and sound bites targeting voter fears, rather than their hopes and aspirations.

Growth is offered as the only solution, with its trade-off benefit "jobs". And again, on all available evidence the focus is on population increases creating demand.

It's a formula that has consistently sold short our capacity to leverage the country's natural resources through investment in research and education to build a smart, resilient and sustainable nation.

In short, politics is dragging this country down. Every state is deep in debt, environments are degrading and under-employment and unemployment are a constant.

So if we are going to have a mature debate about federation and taxes, first let's be honest that what we have now doesn't work.

One set of rules should be sufficient for a population of our size. One national vision and less internal competition would improve the efficiency of our shared output.

Dump the states, strengthen local government and remove all bias towards the current two-party winner-takes-all system, and we just might start to create a true democracy.